Always a walk/hike to get fresh air ,either 5 Rivers. the Cohoes Falls trail, Washington park, Saratoga Battlefield. Plus always stop at a Stewarts after, love that they’re open on XMAS day and many are there!!! It’s comforting in a way!

When I was a kid our family used to always get Burger King on Christmas Eve. That probably sounds lame. But what would happen, is we would go to our grandparents’ house for Christmas Eve with our aunts, uncles and cousins. We’d do presents, but never food. My grandparents ate weird (gross) stuff like spam and canned oysters–as a meal. And while it was always offered, us kids never wanted to partake.
So by 7 or so when we headed home to wait for Santa, we’d all be starving. One year, my brother and I begged our parents for some food, so they pulled into the Burger King a couple miles down the road from my grandparents’ house. They were just getting ready to close, but very kindly accommodated us. The next year, the whole family (about 14 of us) went to that Burger King after Grandma and Pop’s house, and we did every year after that until my grandparents passed away. The staff knew we’d be there, and started putting more people on and stayed open until 8:00pm. Even today my brother and I will stop at a BK on Christmas Eve and get chicken tenders, just for tradition’s sake.

When my father was a child, his father would read Richard Scarry’s The Animal’s Merry Christmas (a collection of short Christmas stories) each night leading up to Christmas during the month of December. He carried on that tradition with me, always saving our favorite stories for Christmas Eve. I continued that tradition with my 2 girls and I hope they will continue the tradition with their children someday. I even managed to secure a new copy of the book (now out of print) a few years ago, because my copy was falling apart at the binding. My father wrote a letter to both girls that we enclosed in the book, detailing the tradition of the stories.